Does your site have paginated content with Rel=”Prev” & Rel=”Next” Tag?

Paginated content is a popular way most websites split large amounts of content into meaningful sections. Pagination prevents overwhelm to the user. Pagination is typically a numbered navigation listed below a set of items or post.

These URLs are often of the following form

www.example.com/category/random?page=2

www.example.com/category/random/page/2

www.example.com/category/random&page=2

A pagination is typically used for two purposes

A blog or a news website looking to split a long-form article into multiple pages.

An e-commerce site listing multiple products under a category.

A forum which has a pagination to take users to see more discussion.

Paginated Content and SEO

Although Google is good at understanding paginated content one can optimize paginated content using few simple tags. This allows us to have better control of how we want Google to perceive our site pages.

The simple way of getting this done is using the Rel=”Next” and Rel=”Prev” tag.

Using this tag we can tell Google that a certain set of pages belong to a logical sequence of pages. Once this directive is presented to Google it understands the content better and also consolidates the link value and ranking signals of all such pages.

Does your site pagination employ Rel=”Next” and Rel=”Prev” tag?

Step 1: Make a list of all cases where your site uses pagination. Few of the cases could be for categories, long-form blog articles or a support forum. Make a note of each URL pattern.

Step 2: Run a complete crawl of your website using DeepCrawl

Step 3: Visit the “First Pages” report under Config > Pagination

Step 4: Check if all the URL patterns which you have listed in step 1 are covered on the list of “First Pages mentioned in Deep Crawl”.

If these URL patterns are not reported here then you have paginated series which have not implemented the Rel=”Next” and Rel=”Prev” tag.

How to implement the Rel=”Next” and Rel=”Prev” tag right?

Let us see how this is applied for a paginated series of 4 for the website www.abc.com/category/news

Your first page in the series which is www.abc.com/category/news should have a rel=”Next” tag in it’s <head> section pointing to www.abc.com/category/news?page=2

<link rel=”next” href=”www.abc.com/category/news?page=2″>

Your second page in the series which is www.abc.com/category/news?page=2 should have a rel=”prev” pointing to www.abc.com/category/news page and rel=”next” pointing to the third page www.abc.com/category/news?page=3.

<link rel=”prev” href=”www.abc.com/category/news”>

<link rel=”next” href=”www.abc.com/category/news?page=3″>

Similarly on Page 3 prev link points to page 2 and the next link points to page 4.

<link rel=”prev” href=”www.abc.com/category/news?page=2″>

<link rel=”next” href=”www.abc.com/category/news?page=4″>

The last page in the series should have a rel=”prev” directive pointing to the last but one page URL in the series. In our case the page is www.abc.com/category/news?page=3

<link rel=”prev” href=”www.abc.com/category/news?page=3″>

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